1. Field
The present invention is directed to a search tool and, more particularly, to a method and system for qualifying keyword(s) or phrase(s) to formulate a query for submitting a search request. The qualification of the keyword(s) or phrase(s) may be used to identify and select providers, resources, advertisements, and/or results.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, users who want to locate information on the Internet submit a search request to information resources such as search engines and retrieve desired information from results returned from the search engines in response to the request. Typically search engines are keyword-driven applications searching for information content indexed in a database as containing keyword(s) specified in the search request submitted by a user and return web pages containing the specified keyword(s). Due to the vast amount of information available on the Internet, relevancy of results returned from search engines are highly dependent on a query or keyword(s) formulated by a user seeking for information. However, current search engines and other similar information resources offer inadequate or no assistance to users in formulating a query to better optimize results, thus requiring the users to repeat searches and browse through returned results in order to locate relevant information.
Technologies have been developed in an attempt to better assist users in seeking information on the Internet, such as specialized search engines searching information of a particular subject area or type of data, meta search engines such as Jux2, Dogpile®, etc., submitting a query to multiple search engines, Internet directories categorizing links to various web sites, etc. However, searches using these and other similar technologies require users, especially those without knowledge of a specific uniform resource locator (URL) or features of an information resource, to browse through contents of web pages to locate desired information and do not provide support in formulating keyword(s) or phrase(s) for a search to assist the users in increasing the probability of accurate results.
The ability of current search technologies to find information depends on indices of information that can be queried for a keyword specified by a user and often causes large numbers of non-relevant results to be returned to the user especially when the keyword has more than one meaning. As such, results returned from search resources are often limited by the quality of a request submitted by the user. For example, if a user submits, “what is the best selling apple product?” as a query for a search, the keyword “apple” may be queried to retrieve data pertaining to the fruit, products of the Apple® computer company, products of the Apple® record label, etc., due to various meanings that may be associated with the keyword “apple”.
In addition, when a keyword that has various associated meanings is contained in a query, advertising information provided is often non-relevant to the meaning of the keyword desired by a user submitting the query. Using the same example as above, when a user submits, “what is the best selling apple product?” as a query for a search, advertising information pertaining to products of the Apple® computer company are often provided although use of the keyword “apple” in the query may be meant to refer to the fruit.
Searching for desired information using typical information resources can be particularly time consuming for users of portable devices such as cellular phones, a personal digital assistant (PDA), etc., which have limited display and input capabilities because current information resources require users to frame queries without assistance and view contents of a broad list of web sites to obtain desired information from search results returned by the information resources.
Although various search tools such as search engines, Internet directories, etc., are available, there is no known way of accurately and efficiently qualifying keyword(s) or phrase(s) for formulating or re-formulating a query to conduct a search.